Best Practice Institute Announces its 2016 Best Practice Awards Winners

PALM BEACH GARDENS, FL – December 5, 2016 — Best Practice Institute is announcing its 2016 Best Practice Awards winners. The Best Practice Awards acknowledge innovators, practitioners, executives, CEOs and consultants who have made a significant positive impact on their organizations and on modern leadership and management principles and practices.

The 2016 winners:

Best Practice Organization/Practitioner Award
Julie Dodd, Ultimate Software

As Senior Vice President and Chief Service Officer of Ultimate Software, Dodd’s core belief is that optimal customer experience is key. Dodd and Ultimate’s Support Services team have utilized the “Voice of the Customer” program to conduct journey-mapping exercises, research various support models and deploy a comprehensive plan to implement a tierless, collaborative-support model for all UltiPro customers.

This approach reduced the total time for Ultimate to resolve all customer support inquiries by 60 percent between May 2015 and June 2016 and resulted in a 97% customer retention rate.

“Our collaborative support model exemplifies Ultimate’s ‘People First’ philosophy and supports our goal of providing not only leading HCM technology but also the people and services behind it,” said Dodd. “We treat our customers as Partners for Life, offering a range of specialized services to help them to grow and transform their organization.”

Best Practices Company Founders
Anne Fulton, Fuel50

As CEO of Fuel50, Fulton and her team are on a mission to support great experiences for people working in large organizations across the globe. Fuel50 helps people define the right internal career path for them, and provides resources and tools to create a continuous career growth experience.

Fuel50 is an interactive cloud-based career path software that helps employees be more engaged. With Fuel50 software, employees can create career acceleration through stretch assignments, peer learning, and coaching and connections with others across the organization, while fast-tracking their career growth with automated plans.

“The talent wars are here, and we are facing a new talent economy, with employees having more power to demand a better career experience or find it elsewhere,” Fulton explained.

Best Practices Company Founders Award
Adam Rogers, Ultimate Software

Rogers, Chief Technology Officer and SVP of Product Development at Ultimate Software, is the responsible for overseeing the strategy, development, and delivery the company’s UltiPro(R) human capital management (HCM) solution. One of the key issues Rogers and his development team tackled was employee retention.

According to Rogers: “Retention is a top challenge for any successful organization. Research indicates that replacing a professional employee can cost more than two times an employee’s salary, in addition to loss in intellectual capital and tacit knowledge when talent leaves.”

Rogers and Ultimate Software’s development team created Leadership Actions, a new prescriptive feature embedded within its UltiPro HCM solution to help managers proactively nurture and engage their teams. With Leadership Actions, Rogers has elevated the role that analytics may play in not only identifying retention risks, but providing managers with in-context coaching and actionable insights that will help them to develop, retain, and motivate their teams.

Best Practices CEO Award
Adam Miller, Cornerstone OnDemand

Miller is the founder and CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand. Miller believes in putting the right employees together to create a meaningful work environment that people will want to be a part of in the long run. Cornerstone helps companies realize the potential of the modern workforce through cloud-based learning and talent management. Miller works with the Product Development team and is involved with hiring and mentoring.

Miller sees the future of talent management to be less about automated processes and annual reviews, and more about empowering employees and using compassion to make sure their reach their highest potential.

Cornerstone Learning has been built over 17 years of continuous development. More than 80 percent of its 28 million active users take advantage of its learning and development solution. It provides deep capability around all types of organizational learning, with flexibility for different types of organizations. This learning ranges from instructor-led training, e-learning and video learning, to collaborative learning, mobile learning, just-in-time contextual learning and much more.

Best Practices CEO Award
Peter Louch, Vemo

Louch is the CEO of Vemo, which offers workforce planning, workforce analytics, predictive analytic services, and implementation consultation to ensure effective and sustainable programs. Key to this work is Vemo’s technology; its state-of-the-art workforce planning software is cloud-based so clients can access, manage, and share easily.

Louch ensures that each client gets what they specifically need to reach the highest impact. Under his leadership, Vemo has successfully implemented dozens of enterprise workforce planning and analytics programs.

“We want to help them be ahead of talent needs,” Louch said, adding that companies never want to have too much talent too soon, or not enough talent when they need them the most. Achieving that balance can be tricky, which is why Louch and his team at Vemo go about it in a customized way.

Best Practice Organization/Practitioner Award
Mark Zides, CoreAxis

Mark Zides is the President of CoreAxis, a company that focuses on people. With over 18 years of consulting and execution-oriented experience, Zides is responsible for building relationships and partnering with CoreAxis clients.

Zides’ leadership style builds trust and confidence in the leaders and individuals he works with, such as Bank of America, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Google, Staples, Verizon, and more. CoreAxis helps clients learn about the newest advances in learning and development, and to separate the fads from the true trends that will impact talent strategy in years to come.

The science of how people learn shows that the old way of long training videos isn’t effective. Shorter, interactive, and the ability of people to choose what they learn is key. “There is no broad brush. Learning is individual,” said Katy Tynan, managing director of CoreAxis.

Best Practice Institute wants to congratulate its award winners. BPI is a leadership and management association focusing on best and innovative business practices. BPI has more than 42,000 subscribers, from managers to senior and C-level talent, HR, and HR Tech executives, including corporate and individual members on five continents and executives and employees of more than half of the Fortune 500. Best Practice Awards are judged by C-Level, Fortune 1000 talent executives.

BPI began honoring exceptional business leaders in 2006. The Best Practice Awards have become among the most coveted awards in management, leadership development and cutting-edge HR Technologies.

“These winners embody the BPI spirit of learning, collaborating, and pioneering,” said Louis Carter, BPI founder and CEO. “They are prime examples of where business is going–they are the innovators, the creators, the forward thinkers.”

Several past winners have gone on to join BPI’s Senior Executive Board including MasterCard’s Chief Talent Officer David Deacon, Humana’s VP of Talent & OD Roger Cude, and KeyBank’s
Chief Talent Officer, Brian Fishel, among others. BPI’s Senior Executive Board is an exclusive benchmarking consortium for heads of talent to share with and learn from each other the best and next practices in talent management, leadership development and organization development.

100s of CEOs have received BPI’s CEO Award including Dow Chemical Company CEO Andrew Liveris, former Genentech CEO and current Apple Chairman Arthur Levinson, Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, FedEx CEO Fred Smith and others.

More information about the Best Practice Awards is available at
https://www.bestpracticeinstitute.org/best-practices-awards.html

Media Contact: Scott Baxt, scottbaxt@bestpracticeinstitute.org, 561-693-2773.

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